The Danger of Donald Trump

It’s easy to see why people think Donald Trump has become the Charlie Sheen of the Republican Party. Gluttons for attention, the two share a rare talent at self-promotion, self-delusion and self-immolation. And Sheen now proclaims himself a birther, in league with Trump’s crusade to promote a lie about President Obama that is also believed by nearly half of G.O.P voters.

But the more you watch Trump crash around the land, leaving shards of fabrication for the rest of us to sweep up, the more you realize who he’s really like: Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who has served longer than any leader of his country since Mussolini goose-stepped over bell’Italia.

The surface matches are compelling. Hair plugs for Berlusconi, a pricey thatch of some sort for Trump. Berlusconi regularly insults women in public. Trump has also publically called at least one woman a “fat pig.” Berlusconi brought sexed-up game shows to Italian television. Trump has a silly “reality” show in which he plays a business mogul. Berlusconi, at 74, socializes with teenage girls. Just shy of his 60th birthday, the thrice-married Trump said that if then-24-year-old Ivanka Trump were not his daughter, “perhaps I’d be dating her.”

When I lived in New York, and later in Italy, I heard many people dismiss these men as a joke. They’re vulgarians — it’s all a sideshow of limos and pouty women with bee-sting lips. But an equally large segment of the population is strangely entranced by Trump and Berlusconi. If Trump is leading in some Republican polls, and Berlusconi still commands a large following despite being on trial for his latest sex scandal, what does it say about an enabling public?
Trump’s latest meteor flash explains less about him and more about the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. (Trump, by the way, once compared Reagan to a con man.) In a month’s time, he became the voice in that party of murky lies usually circulated by people with far less money (and even stranger hair).

Trump and Berlusconi revel in all those things your mother said not to do. They’re crude, obnoxious, boastful and bullying. They are the opposite of classy. And when they go public with something other than money talk or reality television, it gives the more obvious crazies a measure of validation.

Look: I have Trump-fatigue as much as the next guy. Even Donald is now sick of The Donald who dominated the recent news, saying on Thursday that “I’ve spoken my piece” on the birther issue, and was ready to move on. But he can’t just smash things up and then retreat back into his money, letting “other people clean up the mess,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich in “The Great Gatsby.” He has to be held accountable for driving American politics further into the sewer.

Consider the case of Marilyn Davenport, the Orange County Republican official who recently forwarded an e-mail with a picture of Barack Obama superimposed on the face of a baby chimpanzee, with a family of simians. The tag line: “Now you know why no birth certificate.” (She apologized Wednesday, after coming under pressure from the N.A.A.C.P.) Would she have felt free to circulate racist mockups among the well-off in Southern California had Trump not opened the door to the false claims that Obama was born in Kenya?

Or look at a New York Times/CBS poll released on Thursday, showing that a 47 percent plurality of Republican voters don’t think the president of the United States is an American citizen by birth.

“I’ll tell you, people love this issue — especially Republicans,” Trump said when he started on his birther crusade, vowing to send investigators to Hawaii to get to the bottom of what was settled long ago.

The fact-denying block of the Republican party seems to grow daily, thanks to people like Trump. Here, folks: take five minutes and read all of this, a nonpartisan, fact-checked debunking of the birther issue.

By doing that, you’ve done far more than Trump has done. He can’t even get his misinformation right, wrongly claiming on national television that Obama’s grandmother said the president was born in Kenya, or that nobody in Hawaii knew him growing up. Each statement is disproven by a 10-second search of the record.

This week, George Stephanopoulos asked Michele Bachmann whether she believed in the birther garbage. She said she had her own personal documentation of birth.

“Well, I have the president’s birth certificate right here,” said Stephanopoulos, producing a document from Hawaii. “It’s certified. It’s got a certification number. It’s got the registration of the state, signed. It’s got a seal on it, and it says, ‘This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.’”

Bachmann: “Well, then that should settle it.”

Except, it won’t. In true reality-show fashion, Trump has promised some kind of revelation during ratings month in May, about him or Obama. But when pressed this week by a reporter about what his “investigators” had found in Hawaii, he turned churlish and said, “None of your business.”

He’s riding this horse because he has nothing else. Not long ago, Trump was pro-choice on abortion, in favor of universal health care by a single-payer, Canadian-style system, and for higher taxes on the rich — all positions he’s since abandoned. It takes a buffoon with multiple media outlets to make Mitt Romney look like a paragon of character and consistency.

But Trump won’t go away, nor will Berlusconi, not so long as we have a need for someone to give voice to our darker angels — and get away with it.

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Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears here on Fridays. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America” and, most recently, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” As of October 2013, Timothy Egan’s column can be found in a new location in the Opinion section »